dictionary

what's Moss?

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Moss is a pidgin language with a musical phonology. Moss words are elementary melodic shapes. They're recognized by way of four distinctive features: each note can be relatively high or low, far or near, long or short, and separate or contiguous. Moss has a tiny lexicon that ranges over the combinatoric space produced by these distinctions, such that no melodic rudiments are excluded. At the same time, Moss abandons pitch, pacing, inflection, and other aspects of melody to free variation, where they're magnetized by the desire of the speaker.

We generally stop hearing the sound of our voice when we're trying to make a point. If we do become conscious of our voice, we're likely to become distracted from the conversation. Yet, as we say even the most ordinary things, each of us inflects, modulates, and intones our words with an astonishing range of expression. We speak with an effortless virtuosity that would put any musical performer to shame. Moss furnishes this unconscious virtuosity with a musical medium.

Like Esperanto and other auxiliary languages, Moss can serve as a means of communication between people that do not have a natural language in common. Historically, groups of people in this situation have developed simple, makeshift languages called pidgins. Since pidgins are the most practical and historically attested solution to language barriers, Moss emulates them by being as small and simple as possible. It has just 120 words and a few grammatical rules of thumb.

As a result, Moss is very easy to learn. When in doubt, you can always fall back on patterns and idioms that are comfortable to you. If you’re familiar with European notation, then the notation on this website will feel natural to you, but this website is designed so that you can learn just by clicking to listen, then imitating what you hear.

A pidgin is just a starting point for language. If it is adopted by a permanent speech community, it will evolve into a full-fledged language called a creole. The creole that Moss becomes will be shaped by the people that come to speak it. The destiny of this language lies with you – your native language, your culture, your inventiveness, your wit. So take a look around, and then join the conversation!